Madam, – The Department of Justice’s meeting with survivors of the Magdalene laundries represents a positive first step in the right direction (Home News, November, 5th).
Hopefully this development will lead to further discussions involving church, State and survivor groups, and ultimately to an apology and forms of redress and compensation for all survivors and family members.
The Department of Justice stands at the centre of the State’s complicity in “referring individuals to the Magdalene laundries”. For much of the last century the judicial system used “Religious Homes”, including Magdalene laundries, as places of remand, probation and imprisonment for women and young girls. The courts referred young women to these “Homes” because the State refused to make available a borstal institution for young female offenders, despite recommendations to do so (eg, in the so-called Carrigan Report, 1931).
The Department of Justice was aware that the use of these institutions in this manner had no basis in law. The Cussen Report (1936), the State’s first study of the industrial and reformatory schools system, reveals that judges were “reluctant” to send young women and first offenders to the women’s prisons. They overcame this difficulty by sending them to “a home conducted by a religious order” provided the “girl” consented to go there and the home agreed to accept her. The report states that there was no statutory basis for this arrangement.
In 1942, the Department of Justice drafted legislation, The Criminal Justice (Female Offenders) Bill, to provide legal sanction for this practice, and in the process protect the State from legal challenge.
A department memorandum outlines the situation whereby “[p]rison is the only legal place of detention” available to judges in sentencing women. It then details the legal problem at hand: It is true that at present some justices have adopted the practice, in cases where they think fit (usually infanticide cases), to sentence a female offender to a term of imprisonment not to be enforced if she undertakes to stay in a convent for a fixed period. This is, however, only a makeshift practice and there are no positive means of compelling the offender to remain in the convent, if at any time she chooses to leave.
Women referred to the Magdalene laundries by the Irish courts were always entitled to walk free, and the State knew this to be the case.
It never informed the women of their legal entitlements.
Rather, the legislation envisaged by the department would have enabled the Minister to certify “certain residential institutions or houses” as legal places of detention for female prisoners within the meaning of the Prison Acts. And, the industrial and reformatory school system was the preferred model for bringing these religious homes under direct State control. The Minister would appoint “persons to act as Managers”, he would approve “the rules and regulations”, he would retain “the right to have them inspected periodically by inspectors of his department”, and he would be obliged to defray the “cost of upkeep of persons committed to the institutions by way of capitation grants”. The draft “Heads of Bill” legislated for each of these provisions.
How many women are we talking about? Between 1926 and 1964, the courts sent at least 54 women to Catholic Magdalene asylums, at least four Protestant women were sent to the Bethany Home, 26 women went to Our Lady’s Home, Henrietta Street (an institution with a commercial laundry), one woman was sent to the Regina Coeli Hostel, and one woman to the Sean Ros Abbey. In March 1944 the Department of Justice could document an additional twenty-nine women on probation at a variety of religious “Homes”, including six Magdalene laundries.
The Criminal Justice (Female Offenders) Bill, 1942 never did become law. The Religious Congregations running Magdalene Laundries – the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Charity, the Good Shepherd Sisters, and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge – would always resist direct State control. The nuns would never allow “inspectors”: the laundries were never inspected, never regulated. And yet, the practice continued whereby the courts referred women beyond the control of the judicial system into unregulated and non-licensed institutions. And the Department of Justice stood by and refused “to intervene, to come to the aid” of these citizens of the State.
What the Department of Justice must now answer for is its awareness of this “makeshift” practice and its refusal to act. It never prohibited judges from sending women to the laundries. Then as now, the State sought to protect its own interests. It sought to provide legal sanction by way of legislation just as now it cowers behind liability law.
The State must own this historic failure. It must own its complicity and collusion in this particular institutional abuse. And it must account for each and every woman who entered these institutions having been referred there by the courts. – Yours, etc,
JAMES M SMITH,
Associate Professor English
Department and Irish Studies Program,
Boston College,
Massachusetts,
US.